On April 29, I posted a piece entitled Thoughts on exploring a “Pregnant Pause” Focused on an article appearing in this month’s Vogue magazine, I methodically refuted and balanced the article’s bias against medicating with anti-depressants during pregnancy.

Yesterday morning I woke up to find an email notification regarding a new comment on the piece. The author? None other than Adrienne Einarson, one of the most dedicated researchers in the field of SSRI usage during the prenatal period. Adrienne currently serves as Coordinator for the International Reproductive Psychiatry group at Motherisk in Toronto. She has published several studies in her areas of interest which include psychiatry, nausea and vomiting of pregnancy, and alternative medicine. Her RN specialities include psychiatry and midwifery.

Adrienne’s comment deserves its own post. Her voice deserves to be heard. She states up front that she does not often comment or blog but that the bias of the Vogue article upset her so greatly she felt the need to speak out. This letter has been sent to Vogue but has not received any response as of yet. (I have also submitted my piece directly to Vogue but also have not received a response.) She has granted permission for me to share her letter directly with you.

“I do this because I care about women who have to go through this and if my research can help, I will continue doing it.” ~Adrienne Einarson~

Without further ado, I give you Adrienne Einarson’s response to Vogue’s “Pregnant Pause”:

I am writing to you on behalf of an international group of individuals who are involved with reproductive mental health, as either clinicians, researchers and in some cases both. We would like to voice our concerns regarding your recent piece entitled “Pregnant Pause,” which we felt, did not achieve a balanced perspective on this issue, which was surprising to us, coming as it did from such a highly esteemed publication as Vogue.

We appreciate that you decided to do a piece on this often controversial issue, which can make deciding whether or not to take an antidepressant when pregnant, an extremely complicated decision for both the patient and her health care provider. However, we were very disappointed by the extremely biased approach that you took when writing this article. First of all, the data that you quoted is not as recent as you stated, these studies were published in 2005/2006, they were preliminary and the results have not been confirmed in more recent published papers, which you brushed off as not being important.

It is unfortunate that the women you quoted in your piece, thought that they had a baby with a heart defect because they took Paxil® and are suffering unnecessary guilt because of it, as if women don’t have enough to feel guilty about already in these complicated times. You acknowledged that there are probably 250,000 pregnant women taking antidepressants in the US, and you must understand before you can make any conclusions, that 1-3% of all pregnancies involve a baby with a birth defect of some kind, whether a woman takes any medications or not and 1/100 babies are born with a heart defect. That is why, researchers who conduct the best quality studies, use a group of exposed women (taking an antidepressant) with a group of unexposed woman (not taking an antidepressant) and compare the rates of adverse events in both groups. The studies that were conducted in this fashion, did not find a difference in the rates of malformations between the groups, including heart defects with Paxil®. Bottom line, if you do the simple math, it is evident that a large number of women would have had a baby with a defect whether they took an antidepressant or not, including the women in your article.

Another disturbing theme that came up several times in the article, is that physicians hand out antidepressants like candy, and physicians in our group were most offended by this statement as they are very careful about prescribing antidepressants and would not give them to someone who not does not require treatment. Every decision is made with great care, all the while weighing the risks/benefits of antidepressant treatment, and especially with pregnant women, ultimately to ensure the best possible outcome for both the baby and the mother.

Finally, and I am sure this was not your intention, several of our group members who are psychiatrists have reported that their pregnant patients have decided to stop taking their antidepressant since they read your article and I will leave you with one example of the damage you may have caused by this highly biased and often inaccurate article.

After reading this article, a woman called her psychiatrist and informed her that she was not going to take her Prozac anymore. She had had no less than seven consultations with psychologists and psychiatrists and all had agreed that she needed to be on medication because of her severe depression and possibility of suicide and concern in the post-partum period. She had finally agreed to go on the medication and at 34 weeks she was doing very well and looking forward to the birth of her baby and then read your article…………

Adrienne Einarson, Coordinator, The International Reproductive Psychiatry group